Has anybody read this book about the most astounding secrets of WWII ? It's got some interesting WI speculations, such as WI the Allies hadn't decided on the 'unconditional surrender' policy against Nazi Germany, which might've enabled US and British forces to wade ashore at Normandy unopposed and greeted as friends by Rommel (a bit farfetched, IMHO, to say the least). I think there was also a subsequent title called BAFFLING or UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF WWII, which discusses such unsolved aspects of the conflict as why Reinhard Heydrich was allowed to achieve such a high rank within the SS despite his proven Jewish blood, and what happened to such ppl who disappeared mysteriously as Glenn Miller and his band over the English channel, the crew of the B24 Liberator LADY BE GOOD over the Libyan desert, and Gen Bull Kierans of the 82nd Airborne who vanished without trace during the invasion of Sicily IIRC.

I never bother with any book which has a title like "Astounding Secrets" or "Baffling Mysteries." The writer is always under pressure to sensationalise. Books have been written demolishing "space gods" or the Bermuda Triangle- and these sell a fraction of the copies of those produced by ostensible believers. Heydrich had proven Jewish blood? According to Padfield in his biography of Himmler, all this boiled down to was that his widowed grandmother had married a mann called Suss, frequently a Jewish name (remember your Feuchtwanger.)

If WWII had ended in 1944, we would have had to fight WWIII in 1965. With nukes. Germany had to learn not to invade other countries the hard way. A 1944 ending would have been WWI over again for the civilian leadership of Germany, a war with all the suffering done by other people, like the young German men in the army, and the civilians in other countries that Germany had occupied or invaded.
Lots of reactionary traitors in other countries would have liked just that. It's always graveled the ruling class that they lost out almost as much as the poor did in WWII. They prefer that the poor and working class people do the suffering and they get the benefits. Sharing the pain is not what they believe in.
A nuclear war will kill everybody, especially older people who can't work growing food, cutting down wood for fuel and housing, or digging up landfills for repairable stuff. They sort of understand that they won't be rich after a nuclear war. Sort of. Which is probably why they haven't arranged for us to fight one, yet.

"If WWII had ended in 1944, we would have had to fight WWIII in 1965. With nukes. Germany had to learn not to invade other countries the hard way."

Please WK. The notion that WWI and WWII are exclusively the fault of EEVIL Germany is rather specious. Most of the people who believe that either ignorant of the situation and events leading up to the wars or have grudges against Germany for faults real and imagined and have let their anger (justified or not) consume them and blind them to rationality.

"Lots of reactionary traitors in other countries would have liked just that."

Or perhaps lots of people who wanted to save lives and end suffering on both sides, unlike "chickenhawk" (FDR, Morganthau, and Wallace didn't serve in WWI) leftist idealogues with megalomaniacal visions of remaking the entire world New Deal-style like some Bushite ideologues want to remake the Middle East and uncaring about the human costs involved (Morganthau, when informed that his deindustrialization scheme would starve 20 million Germans, essentially replied that he didn't care; Wallace wanted to use Germans as slave labor for Tennessee Valley Authority projects in the Congo).

Read "The New Dealer's War." The similarities between FDR's people, the folks who got the US involved in Vietnam, and today's "neo-cons" are stunning.

Your view that WWII is a Holy War, those who opposed either the war outright or waging the war FDR's way are traitors (not just incorrect, but actively conniving with the enemy), and the Cold War was not only unnecessary but also a justified reason for the US being nuked by terrorists today (expressed numerous times on the old board) seems more appropriate for someone like William Blum (socialist author of "Killing Hope" who thinks that the Cold War was really a US attempt to rule the world).

Wallace? You mean the left wing vice president Wallace, not the right wing populist Governor Wallace? VP Wallace made his money in tech by developing corn breeding technology to improve corn yields. Got very rich. Techs wouldn't try using European slave labor in the Congo.
Hell, when the right wing types tried using slave labor in the Congo just twenty five years earlier, the slaves all died. It's hell trying to make a profit when you have to keep replacing your slave labor force every three months. God knows how long the Germans would have lasted, but it wouldn't have been as long as the Africans did. Not very practical.
The Russians used ten million German and collaborationist slave laborers in Siberia and even in that much less disease ridden environment more than half of them died before their ten years was up. The Congo just wasn't a reasonable use of European labor. Now if you said that there was some secret liberal plan to send them to Alaska I might believe it...
After WWI we paid them reparations to strengthen them against the Bolshevik menace. They killed fifty million people. After WWII we took almost 20% of their land and occupied them for a generation. They haven't tried to conquer the world since.
Makes you wonder what the Arabs have planned for us...Or those other people mentioned in 'Killing Hope'.

NXIV- Never, ever, point someone in the direction of a site called STRAIGHTDOPE. It has a certain ring of "Honest Fred the Bookie" about it. Anyway the question of Hitler's ancestry is discussed in volume one of Kershaw's biography which must now rank as standard. He doesn't believe the story.

On the spur of the moment I can only think of one "secret" of WWII that might interest me- Butler's actions in 1940.

Incidentally, discussion of "unconditional surrender" is usually code for "we should have made a deal with Germany."

"Incidentally, discussion of "unconditional surrender" is usually code for "we should have made a deal with Germany."

Not necessarily. Rommel, Canaris, and others--the "Front of Decent People"--would have gladly tried and executed the Nazis, withdrawn from Nazi conquests, and made peace with the Allies. The leadership WK refers to would have gotten precisely what they deserved. Very few would contemplate making a deal with the Nazi leadership, but anti-Nazi dissidents are another thing entirely. One cannot paint ALL Germans with the same brushes.

"After WWI we paid them reparations to strengthen them against the Bolshevik menace."

I was under the impression the Germans were paying others reparations--that was part of the cause of the hyperinflation and suchlike (Germany couldn't pay, the French occupied the coal fields to get reparations, the workers struck, and the German gov't printed money to pay their salaries). The Germans paid the Brits and French $$ and they paid us $$ (war loans).

WK, I do mean left-wing President Wallace. It may not have been practical to use Europeans for slave labor in Central Africa, but perhaps them all dying was the goal.

On the matter of Arabs, the Soviets are just as responsible for the US in terms of Arab suffering--Syria, Egypt, South Yemen, and Iraq, who had not-very-nice-governments were at various points Soviet allies (Syria and South Yemen were the most faithful). In fact, Arab fighters have participated in the Chechen War--the benevolent and progressive Soviet Union isn't exactly beloved.

"Balls. Until the very end, all the "anti-Hitler" Germans wanted to hold on to most of his acquisitions."

Depends on the acquisition. If it's the Sudetenland, Polish Corridor, Austria, Memel, etc, then there really isn't a problem--those areas wanted to go with Germany in the aftermath of WWI, but the Allies wouldn't let them. Self-determination and all that.

However, if they wanted to hold onto France, Benelux, Norway, non-German-inhabited Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, Ukraine, the Baltic states, etc. then you're right, there is a problem.

Quinn
We loaned 3.5 billion dollars to Germany. They paid 3 billions dollars in reparations to France, Belgium, Britain, etc. Read up on the reparations and loans. Some of it is quite funny, as in both humorous and peculiar. Like the British banks wanting to get paid back the 3 billion dollars they loaned to Germany just the last ten years before the war, that let the German government build their navy without having to go to the German parliament to raise taxes.
The Germans sinking their navy in Scapa Floe was part of the deal on who got their merchant marine after the war. The Germans wanted to cut a deal for food in return for the ships, and the British were trying to reserve all the shipping to themselves to keep down competition for American wheat, so they wouldn't deal. The German navy sunk their fleet to put pressure on the British to cut a deal because if the Germans didn't get at least some food for their merchant fleet they would sink it.
We had stuff like that after WWII, also.

"One cannot paint ALL Germans with the same brushes." No, but you can paint most of them. It was useful after the war to spread the myth of the ordinary decent German soldier as against the wicked SS. I think by now this should have worn off. Have a look at Bartov's monograph, THE BARBARISATION OF WAR ON THE EASTERN FRONT (IIRC), which analyses divisional war diaries.

"tried and executed the Nazis..." There were rather a lot of them, you know.

"Unconditional surrender." Well, rather than argue I'll quote from chapter 19 of TOTAL WAR, (Wint, Calvocoressi, and Pritchard, 2nd ed), "Hitler's German Enemies." A book I always admired and was greatly pleased when the OXFORD COMPANION described it as "surpassing the rest" of general histories of WWII: "The most pressing aim of the declaration" (of unconditional surrender at Casablanca in January 1943) "was to hold the Grand Alliance together at a time when Stalin was disappointed and angry and when both Japan and Italy were working for a separate peace between Germany and the USSR- a policy which Ribbentrop was known to favour. In retrospect the overriding importance of this aim still cannot be gainsaid. To risk letting the alliance fall apart implied either the western allies could win on their own or that they could find another ally. Neither during the war or since has it been seriously argued that the western allies could defeat Germany if the German allies were released from their commitments in the east. The only alternative ally that has been suggested is the anti-Nazi Germans. But there was too little reason to suppose that Hitler was going to be overthrown by an internal revolt or that Nazism would be eliminated if Hitler were murdered. The anti-Nazi Germans were no subsitute for the USSR." They go on to point out that even if the Nazis had been got rid off by a faction of the Germany Army there would still remain "the disturbing power of the German state and the German threat to European stability and freedom which had been among the causes of the war."

Ok, fine. Take out the atrocity-committers, high-level people, and a few gauletiers to make a point. The real low-level Party members (esp. those who joined to get better jobs or avoid losing the ones they had), without a leader to rally around, shouldn't be too much of a problem. If not, Rommel, Canaris, and friends could use the same secret-police measures the US used in "de-Nazification." Remember, they're still a nation at war--some sneaky stuff could probably be gotten away with.

""the disturbing power of the German state and the German threat to European stability and freedom"

The US is several orders of magnitude more powerful than Nazi Germany and are WE a threat to Europe's "stability and freedom"? If so, do we need a war to the knife between ourselves and the "international community" to deal with us?

What matters is not power, what matters is INTENT. The US didn't do much outside of the Western Hemisphere until the Spanish-American War and WWI and the French actually sent us the Statue of Liberty as a gift. Even then, the US in terms of sheer industrial mass, could have laid the proverbial smackdown on France. Removing the Nazis removes the "intent" to dominate Europe and (maybe) the world.

"I think by now this should have worn off. Have a look at Bartov's monograph, THE BARBARISATION OF WAR ON THE EASTERN FRONT (IIRC), which analyses divisional war diaries."

True. Put basically decent people into a BAD situation (like war, or the collapse of civilization, etc) and these decent people are capable of doing VERY bad things. To use the film "28 Days Later" as an example, do you think that Major West, when Britain was fine and peaceful, would be capable of letting his soldiers rape women? Probably not, but when Britain has collapsed into plague-ridden anarchy, then...

"The anti-Nazi Germans were no subsitute for the USSR"

If they were successful and managed to topple Hitler, why not? Would you rather have the 21st Century's first terrorist state controlling 2/3 of Europe's land mass, as what happened historically? If the anti-Nazi Germans fail, then so be it; bomb the Nazi SOBs into the Stone Age.

However, according to "The New Dealer's War," other means were available. An exiled German bishop, for example, wanted to bombard Germany with leaflets telling the Germans that if they continued to tolerate "the pogroms" (the Holocaust), the same thing would happen to them. And in the East, it ultimately did--see "A Terrible Revenge." However, the US wouldn't let him.

Plus, from the moral perspective, the Soviets are here plotting to betray us (by making a separate peace with Germany and leaving the West to face the storm). Maybe making peace with anti-Nazi Germans who've toppled the Reich would be just what they deserve--they won't be getting anything out of the deal.

By the way, I have no reason to love Nazis or Germans...my great-Uncle Charlie was killed by the Nazis two weeks before the surrender.

"Matt- I'm sorry but I just can't be bothered putting up an answer. I've got this strong feeling of futility."

Futility? You made me concede one point already (your bit about the "Barbarization of the War on the Eastern Front"), as well as the bit about Italy and Japan trying to arrange a peace between Germany and the USSR.

If the theory that anti-Nazi Germans could topple the Nazi regime from within is killed, then there is no other choice but unconditional surrender and you've won the debate.

OK, Matt. Could the anti-Nazis have toppled the Nazi regime? In my opinion, no. Even if they had killed Hitler, what would have happened next? After the July attentat, they dithered disastrously. Stauffenberg came back to Berlin and discovered that nothing was being done- they were waiting to "ascertain the situation." Remember, Hitler is still massively popular. Himmler and Goebbels raise the cry of another "stab in the back", a repeat of 1918. The conspirators would have been lucky if the mob were satisfied with lynching them. The sad truth is that if someone like Model had been a leader of the conspiracy it might have had a chance of success. But he, of course, was a staunch Hitler supporter. I suspect that the characteristics which led people to join the conspiracy (as opposed to the generals who simply said nothing) were not those of a successful plotter.